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Is Freemius a WordPress.org Compliant?

Mos-def! If you are familiar with the guidelines, you already know that “phoning home” is not allowed without the user’s consent. Therefore, we don’t capture any information without user opt-in. We probably have the most strict opt-in form in the wp.org repo.

What makes Freemius WordPress.org compliant?

We’ve built a special PHP preprocessor that looks into your project’s PHP files and uses the SDK calls in your code as annotations to understand what parts of it should be excluded from the free product version. Then, the preprocessor automatically generates a free version of your plugin by striping away all of its premium code.

The free version is the version that should be uploaded to WordPress.org, in order to comply with the WordPress.org guidelines.

Can I use Freemius Insights on CodeCanyon and ThemeForest?

Yes! It’s compliant with the marketplace rules. In fact, a similar analytics product, called PressTrends, was widely adapted by ThemeForest and CodeCanyon developers in early 2014.

Can I use Insights in my Premium only plugin or theme?

Yes, you can! In addition, since you are not obligated to any guidelines, you can capture all the information and skip the opt-in screen. If you do so, you would need to explicitly mention that part in your privacy and terms of use. Having said that, since no one actually reads the privacy and terms, we recommend using the opt-in screen as an ethical transparency act.

Can I use Freemius with my theme?

Yes! Freemius is now fully integrated with themes!

Will you share the captured emails with someone else?

Your data is safe and sound. We will never-ever, never-ever share your captured user emails with any 3rd party.

What payment methods can I accept with Freemius?

We use Stripe and PayPal, and therefore accepts all major credit cards and PayPal payments.

Note that due to regulations in Germany, PayPal’s recurring profiles (subscriptions) are not supported. Therefore, German customers will not have the PayPal payment options available.

Can I customize the opt-in screen?

We have crafted special filters to customize the messaging and buttons of the opt-in screen. You can also completely edit the PHP template file in the SDK. Make sure you keep it clear about what information is being captured and that it’s sent to Freemius. Otherwise, it won’t be compliant with the WordPress.org guidelines.

Do I need to set up a gateway to sell with Freemius?

Nope. No need for that because Freemius serves as your reseller.

What currencies do you support?

At the moment you can only sell and receive payments in US dollars.

Does Freemius store customer credit card numbers on Freemius servers?

We aren’t crazy 🙂 Credit Cards do not even “touch” our servers and “speak” directly to Stripe, a well trusted and secure gateway.

Is Freemius Checkout PCI compliant?

Yes, we are PCI compliant; we use PayPal Express Checkout and Stripe.js, and our checkout is secured with an HTTPS protocol.

Is Freemius In-App/Dashboard checkout PCI compliant?

Can I customize the in-dashboard pricing and checkout pages?

The pricing page is automatically generated and styled by Freemius, following WordPress admin dashboard design practices. We make sure it looks natural and optimized for best conversation results.
We have years of experience optimizing conversion, and we use data to continuously improve on the pricing page.
We do provide an option to add custom CSS stylesheets to enable personalization.
You can add those stylesheets in PLANS -> CUSTOMIZATION:

Note: For now, we do not recommend using custom CSS since changes in the page HTML structure maymight break your styles. We’ll try to communicate any changes in the HTML DOM. Having said that, and for the sake of agile development, we do not guarantee notifying you about any changes – it’s up to you to monitor changes.

Do you support coupons?

Yes – we support absolute amounts and percentage based coupons.
You can set up the effective date range of a coupon validity, set whether the discount should apply for all payments or only for the initial payment, and other cool customization options.

Does Freemius supports EU VAT?

Avoid the hassles of EU VAT compliance by having Freemius handle VAT collection, compliance and payments. Utilize support for real-time VAT ID validation and exemption when selling to businesses.

How much do I have to generate in order volume using Freemius before I can get paid?

The minimum account balance required for payment is $100.00.

Can I refund my customers?

You can refund transactions up to 30 days after the transaction was successfully processed and payment was created.
We currently only offer full refunds (no partial refunds).
If you’d like to refund a customer after the 30 days refund window is over, we recommend resolving the refund request with your own payment services.

Do you offer automated recurring/subscription-based billing?

We support automatic renewals, and encourage developers to sell subscriptions to build long term sustainable businesses. It increases renewals rate, removes the hassle of payment renewal and increases your bottom line. Freemius monthly and annual plans are both automatically renewed.

How long will it take until the customer sees the refund?

While some refunds may be instantaneous, credit refunds can take 5–10 business days to show up in their customer’s credit card statement.

What happens if a customer disputes a payment / chargeback?

The payment amount will be temporarily be held and we’ll contact you ASAP, giving you the a chance to resolve the dispute directly with the customer.

If the dispute isn’t resolved, we’ll step inup and handle each case individually.

If the dispute is resolved in your favor, you are all good.

If the dispute is resolved in favor of the customer, the held amount will be refunded to the customer.

If it was a bank dispute (via Stripe), chargebacks incur a fee of $15 which will be deducted from your balance.

Do you offer specialized pricing for micro-transactions like on Apple’s App Store or Google’s Android Market?

The recommended minimum price per transaction is $3.99. Otherwise, your processing fee will be as high as 30%-50% due to the minimum per transaction rates charged by Stripe and PayPal. Email us to discuss your specific situation.

How do you handle downloads and file hosting?

What provision is there for users to export their data if they wanted to leave the platform?

Many marketplaces choose to hide their customers’ data from developers and “lock them” inside the platform.

We believe that the data belongs to the developers. If a developer decides to leave the platform for any reason whatsoever, he/she can easily download their user-list from our dashboard with one click, and they can access all of their data by leveraging our RESTful API for migration purposes.

Can I customize the ‘From’ addresses of the email messages sent by Freemius?

Yep – you can do that in the ‘Email Addresses’ section.

Do you support affiliates?

Yes we do! Freemius comes with a fully-featured Affiliation Platform which you can utilize to onboard and manage affiliates.

What is your pricing?

Unlike other solutions, we see and treat our customers as partners. Hence, our pricing is based on a revenue share model. A model that pushes us to work harder and to continuously improve our offering to help get more dollars for our partners. The success of our business is directly related to the success of our partners’ businesses. Here is the pricing structure:

30% on first $1k

20% on $1k-$5k

10% after crossing the $5k

Since we cover the gateway fees (~3%), it practically means that the rev-share is 7% after $5k in aggregated revenues with Freemius. In addition, based on data we have tracked, our in-dashboard checkout increases conversion rate by an average of 12%. So after doing the math, for freemium plugins, there’s an expected bump of at least 5% in revenues, after the rev-share split.

The reason we are taking a larger cut from the initial revenues is related to the fact that we have to invest exponentially way more support resources at the initial stages of your product integration with Freemius (during on-boarding, integration and testing), while sometimes providing almost real-time slack support. We therefore want to get some return on our investment. In any way, we don’t charge you anything until you make money with Freemius.

Obviously, when an established business migrates over to Freemius, we offer volume discounts, provide migration assistance and dedicated support.

What does the license renewal process look like for customers?

All plans (besides lifetime / one-time plan) are automatically renewed.
For annual plans, the customer will receive a friendly reminder email a month prior to renewal date, giving them enough time to cancel the subscription, if they are so inclined.

I’m selling with EDD (Easy Digital Downloads) from my website, can I sell in parallel with Freemius from the WP Admin dashboard?

How can I send emails to my users and customers?

We don’t provide a custom emailing mechanism. We might offer this option in the future as an additional paid package.
For now, the best way is to either download the ‘users list’ file from the USERS section in the dashboard, or leverage our webhooks mechanism by pushing users’ details, including emails, to mailing platforms such as MailChimp or Customer.io.

Does Freemius supports prorating?

Proration handles the increase or decrease to the subscription price when a price changes during any period of a subscription.
Currently Freemius does not support prorating, but we are working on it.

Can I offer free trial to my users?

Yes. You can set a trial period in your plan settings. Just make sure to turn the “Require Credit Card or PayPal” option off.

Note: Trials are currently only supported from within the WordPress admin dashboard, as ATM Freemius Checkout doesn’t support trials.

How do trials work if I have a free version on WordPress.org?

If you have a free version, after 24 hours, a dismissible admin notice with a trial offer will automatically appear in the WP admin dashboard.
Clicking on the “Start free trial” button will redirect the user to the plugin’s in-dashboard pricing page with the option to start a trial with any of the plans.
Once the user selects a plan and starts the trial, the premium version is securely accessible through a download link which will appear in an admin notice and in an automated email.

Can I offer paid trial to my users?

Yes. You can set a trial period in your plan settings and turn on the “Require Credit Card or PayPal” option.

Is your SDK RTL compliant?

Yes, it is.

Under the “Sites” menu, what is the difference between “Plan” and “Is Premium”?

If you name your paid plan as “Premium” you might get a little confused with the terminology.
The data under the plan column shows the current plan of the install.“Is Premium” tells if that site is running the free or the premium code version of your module.

Deactivatinge the license will not cancel the subscription.
It’s there for cases in which the customer wants to migrate a license to a different installation (for example, when migrating to a different host or domain).

What languages is your WordPress SDK translated to?

You can check out all of the supported languages and help us translate the SDK (we know you want to be on our hall of fame 😉 ) on our Transifex translations manager.

How to switch the language on the pricing and checkout pages in the dashboard?

This is a work in progress.
Currently, the pricing and checkout pages are only in English. Making them translatable is part of our roadmap.

Can I protect my premium offering if the user cancels the trial or if the trial is over and the user didn’t upgrade?

If a user got your premium code via a trial but never paid for a license, you can block the premium logic and protect yourself from trial abuse by using the following code:

If ( my_fs()->can_use_premium_code() ) {
// … premium code ...
}

By default, all trials are “blocking” to prevent trial abusement. So if the trial is over/expired and the user didn’t upgrade (or canceled the trial), the premium features will be blocked even if you set your plan to keep the features and only block updates and support:

Can I offer a discount on license renewals?

Yes, you can. Keep in mind though, that our annual and monthly plans renew automatically.
This means that customers don’t have to take any proactive action to renew the license.
In other words, you don’t need to convince the customer to renew. The decision is whether to cancel the license or continue. Because of that, unless a customer is unhappy with your plugin or has stopped using it, a renewal discount has no significant effect on that decision.

Therefore, as a rule of thumb, we do not recommend setting a discount for renewals unless your plugin does not provide a continued value (e.g. a migration plugin, or any one-time action plugin). In that case, maybe it is worth setting up a lifetime price.

Can I upsell multi-site licenses?

Yes. You can set up custom monthly, annual and lifetime pricing for any amount of licenses.

Are there any additional fees for receiving payments through PayPal?

What will my customers see on their Credit-Card and PayPal statement?

People who purchase your WordPress product via Freemius get a CC statement after purchase. That statement will show your plugin’s name.
For PayPal, the store name will be your product’s name but PayPal emails will state Freemius and will include the plugin description in the plan. Unfortunately, PayPal doesn’t provide a way to tweak this further.

I received a subscription notification without a payment notification, what’s going on?

Due to the way PayPal’s recurring profiles mechanism works, it can take up to 24 hours until Freemius receives the approval notification for the subscriptions’ initial payment. To keep a smooth purchase experience for customers, Freemius will email the license key and the download link to the premium digital good – right away.

To mitigate a potential abuse, when a customer subscribes to your product the system will issue a 24-hour blocking license. Once we receive the payment notification from PayPal, the license will be extended based on the subscription billing cycle, and the blocking state of the license will be auto-adjusted based on the plan’s configuration.

We could have designed the upgrade process slightly different, emailing the downloadable product only after the payment approval, but we decided that we aren’t going to “break” a proper subscription UX just because of a small group of trolls that can abuse this PayPal flaw.

International wires will automatically be converted to the local currency. Due to our high volumes we’ve managed to negotiate great terms for currency conversion-rates and a complete international wire fee waiver with our bank.